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Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Happy Halloween!

I love Halloween. We need a lot more holidays that allow people to dress in costume and eat an entire bag of Reese’s cups. Seriously, just think about how much better Valentine’s Day would be if you could buy yourself a box of chocolates while being an imperial stormtrooper.

I squandered a few Halloweens in my childhood by wearing the same fairy princess dress for multiple years in a row, thus forever missing my chance to be baby Yoda. Since then, I’ve learned to show greater respect for the idols of my formative years.

[Important Update: It has come to my attention that some people think the creature pictured above is Cookie Monster. If you missed this important part of Sesame Street, I feel really bad for you.]

In addition to dressing up and sugar, I also love being good at things, which is why I rarely go dancing. However, one of the community centers in town has swing dancing every Tuesday night, and my roommate convinces me to come roughly once per year for the Halloween costume contest. A little coordination-based loss of dignity is a fair price to pay for dancing with the Dread Pirate Roberts and Dr. Horrible.

This year I couldn’t settle on an appropriate nerd culture role model, so I wore this:

I received a couple of compliments and only one “You look like you’re twelve,” but I just joined the contest for the fun of it. My outfit could never compete on the level of the guy who built a Transformer suit out of spare car parts.

But to my intense surprise, when they started announcing the winners, I had come in first!

In the children’s category.

Specificity was clearly not this contest’s top priority, though. Other winners, as announced from the stage, included:

I asked Jean-Luc how he felt about being demoted from Captain to “dude.” Apparently it’s a little like dressing as food and being mistaken for a middle-schooler.

Picard did dance with me, though. My level of excitement was probably sufficient to put me on some kind of watch list for deranged stalkers of fictional characters. I elected not to mention my own tenure on the Enterprise.